Arthur Miller

Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in Harlem, in the New York City borough of Manhattan, the second of three children of Augusta (Barnett) and Isidore Miller. Miller was Jewish,[4][5][6] and of Polish-Jewish descent.[7][8][9][10] His father was born in Radomyśl Wielki, Galicia (then part of Austria-Hungary, now Poland), and his mother was a native of New York whose parents also arrived from that town.[11] Isidore owned a women's clothing manufacturing business employing 400 people. He became a wealthy and respected man in the community.[12] The family, including Miller's younger sister Joan Copeland, lived on West[13] 110th Street in Manhattan, owned a summer house in Far Rockaway, Queens, and employed a chauffeur.[14] In the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the family lost almost everything and moved to Gravesend, Brooklyn.[15] (One source says they moved to Midwood)[16] As a teenager, Miller delivered bread every morning before school to help the family.[14] After graduating in 1932 from Abraham Lincoln High School, he worked at several menial jobs to pay for his college tuition at the University of Michigan.[15][17] After graduation (circa 1936), he began to work as a psychiatric aide and also a copywriter before accepting faculty posts at New York University and University of New Hampshire. On May 1, 1935, Miller joined the League of American Writers (1935–1943), whose members included Alexander Trachtenberg of International Publishers, Franklin Folsom, Louis Untermeyer, I. F. Stone, Myra Page, Millen Brand, Lillian Hellman, and Dashiell Hammett. (Members were largely either Communist Party members or fellow travelers.)[18]

At the University of Michigan, Miller first majored in journalism and worked for the student paper, The Michigan Daily, as well as the satirical Gargoyle Humor Magazine. It was during this time that he wrote his first play, No Villain.[19] Miller switched his major to English, and subsequently won the Avery Hopwood Award for No Villain. The award brought him his first recognition and led him to begin to consider that he could have a career as a playwright. Miller enrolled in a playwriting seminar taught by the influential Professor Kenneth Rowe, who instructed him in his early forays into playwriting;[20] Rowe emphasized how a play is built in order to achieve its intended effect, or what Miller called "the dynamics of play construction".[21] Rowe provided realistic feedback along with much-needed encouragement, and became a lifelong friend.[22] Miller retained strong ties to his alma mater throughout the rest of his life, establishing the university's Arthur Miller Award in 1985 and Arthur Miller Award for Dramatic Writing in 1999, and lending his name to the Arthur Miller Theatre in 2000.[23] In 1937, Miller wrote Honors at Dawn, which also received the Avery Hopwood Award.[19] After his graduation in 1938, he joined the Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal agency established to provide jobs in the theater. He chose the theater project despite the more lucrative offer to work as a scriptwriter for 20th Century Fox.[19] However, Congress, worried about possible Communist infiltration, closed the project in 1939.[15] Miller began working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard while continuing to write radio plays, some of which were broadcast on CBS.[15][19]

In 1940, Miller married Mary Grace Slattery.[24] The couple had two children, Jane and Robert (born May 31, 1947). Miller was exempted from military service during World War II because of a high school football injury to his left kneecap.[15] That same year his first play was produced; The Man Who Had All the Luck won the Theatre Guild's National Award.[25] The play closed after four performances with disastrous reviews.[26]

In 1947, Miller's play All My Sons, the writing of which had commenced in 1941, was a success on Broadway (earning him his first Tony Award, for Best Author) and his reputation as a playwright was established.[27] Years later, in a 1994 interview with Ron Rifkin, Miller said that most contemporary critics regarded All My Sons as "a very depressing play in a time of great optimism" and that positive reviews from Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times had saved it from failure.[28]

In 1948, Miller built a small studio in Roxbury, Connecticut. There, in less than a day, he wrote Act I of Death of a Salesman. Within six weeks, he completed the rest of the play,[19] one of the classics of world theater.[15][29] Death of a Salesman premiered on Broadway on February 10, 1949, at the Morosco Theatre, directed by Elia Kazan, and starring Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman, Mildred Dunnock as Linda, Arthur Kennedy as Biff, and Cameron Mitchell as Happy. The play was commercially successful and critically acclaimed, winning a Tony Award for Best Author, the New York Drama Circle Critics' Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was the first play to win all three of these major awards. The play was performed 742 times.[15]

In 1949, Miller exchanged letters with Eugene O'Neill regarding Miller's production of All My Sons. O'Neill had sent Miller a congratulatory telegram; in response, he wrote a letter that consisted of a few paragraphs detailing his gratitude for the telegram, apologizing for not responding earlier, and inviting Eugene to the opening of Death of a Salesman. O'Neill replied, accepting the apology, but declining the invitation, explaining that his Parkinson's disease made it difficult to travel. He ended the letter with an invitation to Boston, a trip that never occurred.[30]

In 1955, a one-act version of Miller's verse drama A View from the Bridge opened on Broadway in a joint bill with one of Miller's lesser-known plays, A Memory of Two Mondays. The following year, Miller revised A View from the Bridge as a two-act prose drama, which Peter Brook directed in London.[31] A French-Italian co-production Vu du pont, based on the play, was released in 1962.

Miller and Marilyn Monroe tie the knot in Westchester County, New York, 1956

In June 1956, Miller left his first wife, Mary Slattery, whom he had married in 1940, and wed film star Marilyn Monroe.[24] They had met in 1951, had a brief affair, and remained in contact since.[15][24] Monroe had just turned 30 when they married; she never had a real family of her own and was eager to join the family of her new husband.[32]^:156

Monroe began to reconsider her career and the fact that trying to manage it made her feel helpless. She admitted to Miller, "I hate Hollywood. I don't want it anymore. I want to live quietly in the country and just be there when you need me. I can't fight for myself anymore."[32]^:154

She converted to Judaism to "express her loyalty and get close to both Miller and his parents", writes biographer Jeffrey Meyers.[32]^:156 Monroe told her close friend, Susan Strasberg: "I can identify with the Jews. Everybody's always out to get them, no matter what they do, like me."[32]^:156 Soon after she converted, Egypt banned all of her movies.[32]^:157

Away from Hollywood and the culture of celebrity, Monroe's life became more normal; she began cooking, keeping house and giving Miller more attention and affection than he had been used to.[32]^:157 His children, aged twelve and nine, adored her and were reluctant to return to their mother when the weekend was over.[32]^:157 As she was also fond of older people, she got along well with his parents, and the feeling was mutual.[32]^:157

Later that year, Miller was subpoenaed by the HUAC, and Monroe accompanied him.[33] In her personal notes, she wrote about her worries during this period:

I am so concerned about protecting Arthur. I love him—and he is the only person—human being I have ever known that I could love not only as a man to which I am attracted to practically out of my senses—but he is the only person—as another human being that I trust as much as myself...[34]

Miller began work on writing the screenplay for The Misfits in 1960, directed by John Huston and starring Monroe. But it was during the filming that Miller and Monroe's relationship hit difficulties, and he later said that the filming was one of the lowest points in his life.[35] Monroe was taking drugs to help her sleep and more drugs to help her wake up, which caused her to arrive on the set late and then have trouble remembering her lines. Huston was unaware that Miller and Monroe were having problems in their private life. He recalled later, "I was impertinent enough to say to Arthur that to allow her to take drugs of any kind was criminal and utterly irresponsible. Shortly after that I realized that she wouldn't listen to Arthur at all; he had no say over her actions."[36]

Shortly before the film's premiere in 1961, Miller and Monroe divorced after their five years of marriage.[19] Nineteen months later, August 4, 1962, Monroe died of a likely drug overdose.[24] Huston, who had also directed her in her first major role in The Asphalt Jungle in 1950, and who had seen her rise to stardom, put the blame for her death on her doctors as opposed to the stresses of being a star: "The girl was an addict of sleeping pills and she was made so by the God-damn doctors. It had nothing to do with the Hollywood set-up."[37]

Miller married photographer Inge Morath in February 1962. She had worked as a photographer documenting the production of The Misfits. The first of their two children, Rebecca, was born September 15, 1962. Their son, Daniel, was born with Down syndrome in November 1966. Against his wife's wishes, Miller had him institutionalized, first at a home for infants in New York City, and then at the Southbury Training School in Connecticut. Though Morath visited Daniel often, Miller never visited him at the school and rarely spoke of him.[38][39] Miller and Inge remained together until her death in 2002. Arthur Miller's son-in-law, actor Daniel Day-Lewis, is said to have visited Daniel frequently, and to have persuaded Arthur Miller to meet with him.

In 1952, Elia Kazan appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Kazan named eight members of the Group Theatre, including Clifford Odets, Paula Strasberg, Lillian Hellman, J. Edward Bromberg, and John Garfield,[40] who in recent years had been fellow members of the Communist Party.[41] Miller and Kazan were close friends throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, but after Kazan's testimony to the HUAC, the pair's friendship ended.[41] After speaking with Kazan about his testimony, Miller traveled to Salem, Massachusetts, to research the witch trials of 1692.[24] He and Kazan did not speak to each other for the next ten years. Kazan later defended his own actions through his film On the Waterfront, in which a dockworker heroically testifies against a corrupt union boss.[42] Miller would retaliate to Kazan's work by writing A View from the Bridge, a play where a longshoreman ousts his co-workers motivated only by jealousy and greed. He sent a copy of the initial script to Kazan and when the director asked in jest to direct the movie, Miller replied "I only sent you the script to let you know what I think of Stool-Pigeons."

In The Crucible, Miller likened the situation with the House Un-American Activities Committee to the witch hunt in Salem in 1692.[43][44][33] The play opened at the Beck Theatre on Broadway on January 22, 1953. Though widely considered only somewhat successful at the time of its release, today The Crucible is Miller's most frequently produced work throughout the world.[24] It was adapted into an opera by Robert Ward in 1961.

While newsmen take notes, Chairman Dies of House Un-American Activities Committee reads and proofs his letter replying to Pres. Roosevelt's attack on the Committee, October 26, 1938

The HUAC took an interest in Miller himself not long after The Crucible opened, denying him a passport to attend the play's London opening in 1954.[19] When Miller applied in 1956 for a routine renewal of his passport, the House Un-American Activities Committee used this opportunity to subpoena him to appear before the committee. Before appearing, Miller asked the committee not to ask him to name names, to which the chairman, Francis E. Walter (D-PA) agreed.[45] When Miller attended the hearing, to which Monroe accompanied him, risking her own career,[24] he gave the committee a detailed account of his political activities.[46] Reneging on the chairman's promise, the committee demanded the names of friends and colleagues who had participated in similar activities.[45] Miller refused to comply, saying "I could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on him."[45] As a result, a judge found Miller guilty of contempt of Congress in May 1957. Miller was sentenced to a fine and a prison sentence, blacklisted, and disallowed a US passport.[47] In 1958, his conviction was overturned by the court of appeals, which ruled that Miller had been misled by the chairman of the HUAC.[48]

Miller's experience with the HUAC affected him throughout his life. In the late 1970s, he joined the other celebrities (including William Styron and Mike Nichols) who were brought together by the journalist Joan Barthel whose coverage of the highly publicized Barbara Gibbons murder case helped raise bail for Gibbons' son Peter Reilly who'd been convicted of his mother's murder based on what many felt was a coerced confession and little other evidence.[49] Barthel documented the case in her book A Death in Canaan which was made as a television film of the same name and broadcast in 1978.[50] City Confidential, an A&E Network series, produced an episode about the murder, postulating that part of the reason Miller took such an active interest (including supporting Reilly's defense and using his own celebrity to bring attention to Reilly's plight) was because he had felt similarly persecuted in his run-ins with the HUAC. He sympathized with Reilly, whom he firmly believed to be innocent and to have been railroaded by the Connecticut State Police and the Attorney General who had initially prosecuted the case.[51][52]

Miller in 1966

In 1964, After the Fall was produced, and is said to be a deeply personal view of Miller's experiences during his marriage to Monroe. The play reunited Miller with his former friend Kazan: they collaborated on both the script and the direction. After the Fall opened on January 23, 1964, at the ANTA Theatre in Washington Square Park amid a flurry of publicity and outrage at putting a Monroe-like character, called Maggie, on stage.[24] Robert Brustein, in a review in the New Republic, called After the Fall "a three and one half hour breach of taste, a confessional autobiography of embarrassing explicitness ... there is a misogynistic strain in the play which the author does not seem to recognize. ... He has created a shameless piece of tabloid gossip, an act of exhibitionism which makes us all voyeurs, ... a wretched piece of dramatic writing."[53] That same year, Miller produced Incident at Vichy. In 1965, Miller was elected the first American president of PEN International, a position which he held for four years.[54] A year later, Miller organized the 1966 PEN congress in New York City. Miller also wrote the penetrating family drama, The Price, produced in 1968.[24] It was Miller's most successful play since Death of a Salesman.[55]

In 1969, Miller's works were banned in the Soviet Union after he campaigned for the freedom of dissident writers.[19] Throughout the 1970s, Miller spent much of his time experimenting with the theatre, producing one-act plays such as Fame and The Reason Why, and traveling with his wife, producing In The Country and Chinese Encounters with her. Both his 1972 comedy The Creation of the World and Other Business and its musical adaptation, Up from Paradise, were critical and commercial failures.[56][57]

Miller was an unusually articulate commentator on his own work. In 1978 he published a collection of his Theater Essays, edited by Robert A. Martin and with a foreword by Miller. Highlights of the collection included Miller's introduction to his Collected Plays, his reflections on the theory of tragedy, comments on the McCarthy Era, and pieces arguing for a publicly supported theater. Reviewing this collection in the Chicago Tribune, Studs Terkel remarked, "in reading [the Theater Essays]...you are exhilaratingly aware of a social critic, as well as a playwright, who knows what he's talking about."[58]

In 1983, Miller traveled to China to produce and direct Death of a Salesman at the People's Art Theatre in Beijing. The play was a success in China[55] and in 1984, Salesman in Beijing, a book about Miller's experiences in Beijing, was published. Around the same time, Death of a Salesman was made into a TV movie starring Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman. Shown on CBS, it attracted 25 million viewers.[19][59] In late 1987, Miller's autobiographical work, Timebends, was published. Before it was published, it was well known that Miller would not talk about Monroe in interviews; in Timebends Miller talks about his experiences with Monroe in detail.[24]

During the early-mid 1990s, Miller wrote three new plays: The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1992), and Broken Glass (1994). In 1996, a film of The Crucible starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Scofield, Bruce Davison, and Winona Ryder opened. Miller spent much of 1996 working on the screenplay for the film.[19]

Mr. Peters' Connections was staged Off-Broadway in 1998, and Death of a Salesman was revived on Broadway in 1999 to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. The play, once again, was a large critical success, winning a Tony Award for best revival of a play.[60]

In 1993, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.[61] Miller was honored with the PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award for a Master American Dramatist in 1998. In 2001 the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) selected Miller for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities.[62] Miller's lecture was entitled "On Politics and the Art of Acting."[63] Miller's lecture analyzed political events (including the U.S. presidential election of 2000) in terms of the "arts of performance," and it drew attacks from some conservatives[64] such as Jay Nordlinger, who called it "a disgrace," [65] and George Will, who argued that Miller was not legitimately a "scholar."[66]

In 1999, Miller was awarded The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize,[67][68] one of the richest prizes in the arts, given annually to "a man or woman who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind's enjoyment and understanding of life."[69] In 2001, Miller received the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. On May 1, 2002, Miller was awarded Spain's Principe de Asturias Prize for Literature as "the undisputed master of modern drama." Later that year, Ingeborg Morath died of lymphatic cancer[70] at the age of 78. The following year Miller won the Jerusalem Prize.[19]

In December 2004, 89-year-old Miller announced that he had been in love with 34-year-old minimalist painter Agnes Barley and had been living with her at his Connecticut farm since 2002, and that they intended to marry.[71] Within hours of her father's death, Rebecca Miller ordered Barley to vacate the premises because she had consistently been opposed to the relationship.[72] Miller's final play, Finishing the Picture, opened at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago, in the fall of 2004, with one character said to be based on Barley.[73] It was reported to be based on his experience during the filming The Misfits,[74] though Miller insisted the play is a work of fiction with independent characters that were no more than composite shadows of history.[75]

Miller died on the evening of February 10, 2005 (the 56th anniversary of the Broadway debut of Death of a Salesman) at age 89 of bladder cancer and heart failure, at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut. He had been in hospice care at his sister's apartment in New York since his release from hospital the previous month.[76] He was surrounded by Barley, family and friends.[77][78] His body was interred at Roxbury Center Cemetery in Roxbury.

The Arthur Miller Foundation was founded to honor the legacy of Miller and his New York City Public School Education. The mission of the foundation is: "Promoting increased access and equity to theater arts education in our schools and increasing the number of students receiving theater arts education as an integral part of their academic curriculum."[88] Other initiatives include certification of new theater teachers and their placement in public schools; increasing the number of theater teachers in the system from the current estimate of 180 teachers in 1800 schools; supporting professional development of all certified theater teachers; providing teaching artists, cultural partners, physical spaces, and theater ticket allocations for students. The foundation's primary purpose is to provide arts education in the New York City school system. The current chancellor of the foundation is Carmen Farina, a large proponent of the Common Core State Standards Initiative. The Master Arts Council includes, among others, Alec Baldwin, Ellen Barkin, Bradley Cooper, Dustin Hoffman, Scarlett Johansson, Tony Kushner, Julianne Moore, Michael Moore, Liam Neeson, David O. Russell, and Liev Schreiber. Son-in-law Daniel Day-Lewis serves on the current board of directors.[89]

The foundation celebrated Miller's 100th birthday with a one-night-only performance of Miller's seminal works in November 2015.[90]

The Arthur Miller Foundation currently supports a pilot program in theater and film at the public school Quest to Learn in partnership with the Institute of Play. The model is being used as an in-school elective theater class and lab. The objective is to create a sustainable theater education model to disseminate to teachers at professional development workshops.[91]

Miller donated thirteen boxes of his earliest manuscripts to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin in 1961 and 1962.[92] This collection included the original handwritten notebooks and early typed drafts for Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, All My Sons, and other works. In January, 2018, the Ransom Center announced the acquisition of the remainder of the Miller archive totaling over 200 boxes.[93][94] The full archive opened in November, 2019.[95]

Christopher Bigsby wrote Arthur Miller: The Definitive Biography based on boxes of papers Miller made available to him before his death in 2005.[96] The book was published in November 2008, and is reported to reveal unpublished works in which Miller "bitterly attack[ed] the injustices of American racism long before it was taken up by the civil rights movement".[96]

In his book Trinity of Passion, author Alan M. Wald conjectures that Miller was "a member of a writer's unit of the Communist Party around 1946," using the pseudonym Matt Wayne, and editing a drama column in the magazine The New Masses.[97][98]

In 1999 the writer Christopher Hitchens attacked Miller for comparing the Monica Lewinsky investigation to the Salem witch hunt. Miller had asserted a parallel between the examination of physical evidence on Lewinsky's dress and the examinations of women's bodies for signs of the "Devil's Marks" in Salem. Hitchens scathingly disputed the parallel.[99] In his memoir, Hitch-22, Hitchens bitterly noted that Miller, despite his prominence as a left-wing intellectual, had failed to support author Salman Rushdie during the Iranian fatwa involving The Satanic Verses.

• Situation Normal (1944) is based on his experiences researching the war correspondence of Ernie Pyle.
• In Russia (1969), the first of three books created with his photographer wife Inge Morath, offers Miller's impressions of Russia and Russian society.
• In the Country (1977), with photographs by Morath and text by Miller, provides insight into how Miller spent his time in Roxbury, Connecticut and profiles of his various neighbors.
• Chinese Encounters (1979) is a travel journal with photographs by Morath. It depicts the Chinese society in the state of flux which followed the end of the Cultural Revolution. Miller discusses the hardships of many writers, professors, and artists as they try to regain the sense of freedom and place they lost during Mao Zedong's regime.
• Salesman in Beijing (1984) details Miller's experiences with the 1983 Beijing People's Theatre production of Death of a Salesman. He describes the idiosyncrasies, understandings, and insights encountered in directing a Chinese cast in a decidedly American play.
• Timebends: A Life, Methuen London (1987) ISBN 0-413-41480-9. Like Death of a Salesman, the book follows the structure of memory itself, each passage linked to and triggered by the one before.

• Abbotson, Susan C. W. (ed.), Arthur Miller: Collected Essays, Penguin 2016 ISBN 978-0-14-310849-8
• Centola, Steven R. ed. Echoes Down the Corridor: Arthur Miller, Collected Essays 1944–2000, Viking Penguin (US)/Methuen (UK), 2000 ISBN 0-413-75690-4
• Kushner, Tony, ed. Arthur Miller, Collected Plays 1944–1961 (Library of America, 2006) ISBN 978-1-931082-91-4.
• Martin, Robert A. (ed.), "The theater essays of Arthur Miller", foreword by Arthur Miller. NY: Viking Press, 1978 ISBN 0-14-004903-7

• Bigsby, Christopher (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller, Cambridge 1997 ISBN 0-521-55992-8
• Gottfried, Martin, Arthur Miller, A Life, Da Capo Press (US)/Faber and Faber (UK), 2003 ISBN 0-571-21946-2
• Koorey, Stefani, Arthur Miller's Life and Literature, Scarecrow, 2000 ISBN 978-0810838697
• Moss, Leonard. Arthur Miller, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980.